Chewing on gristle at Chateau Heartiste

I‘m beginning to wonder if Chateau Heartiste isn’t so much a “Game” blog as it is an elaborate unannounced contest to see who can say the worst possible things about women in the most pretentiously incoherent prose. My evidence? Heartiste’s latest choice for “comment of the week” from an aspiring ladykiller (hopefully not literally) who calls himself burke.

Burke’s grand insight into the female of the species?

if you could grind a woman’s entire being to dust with your dick, like a mortar and pestle, that’s the oblivion she is searching for

Well, that’s pretty good, as far as pretentious douchebagginess goes, but it’s almost coherent. I mean, dicks are roughly the same basic shape as pestles, and it’s not hard to visualize one grinding away in a little stone bowl. Hell, there’s probably some porn video out there featuring just that.

But then Heartiste comes along and offers his own comment on the comment, and shows burke just how it’s done. And by “it” I mean “awful, pretentious, incoherent misogyny.”

Insight elevated to sheer poetry by the breezy lack of punctuation. Women secretly desire their oblivion at the insistence of an imperious man. As the vessel sex, they must be filled with the life force of another — a powerful man, or a child — to fully experience sublimation of their souls. Thus it is that surrender is encoded in the gristle of woman.

The gristle? It’s “encoded in the gristle?”

Gristle is cartilage. The tough stuff in meat that’s hard to chew. The stuff that sharks have instead of bone. Nothing is “encoded” in it. Animals don’t store all of their genetic material in their gristle.

The somewhat archaic phrase “in the gristle” means “not yet hardened into bone or strengthened into sinew” or, more broadly, “young, weak, and unformed.” It’s not a fancy synonym for “in the genes.”

Here’s the phrase in a sentence — that is, in a sentence written by someone who actually knew how to use language.

A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

Well, come to think of it, that’s a sentence fragment, not a sentence. But at least Edmund Burke understood why that particular metaphoric phrase made sense in that context.

This reminds me, my local female friendly sex toy shop is called Smitten Kitten. I’m sure the rest of you Mammotheers approve of that name 🙂

IDk about anyone else, but I love that name 😀

@titanblue

And onthe whole TMI subject, did any other vagina-owner have this thing where everyone said that menstruation meant producing blood so when I got my first one and it was just dark brown gunk, I was confused and wondered what the hell was happening?

I don’t know about my first period (can’t remember it at all) but lots of my earlier periods had dark brown gunk in them.

@malitia

Well… my menstruation in the early years was excessive. Much blood and a 10-14 days period. I ended up having a 2 month long one when I was 12 and almost bled to death.

Um wow. That sounds terrifying.

@Luzbelitx

thanks for the answer :3 I think I”ve got enough information atm, with you and other people helping, for if I feel like I wanna try one.

Terrible sex ed stories:

Gosh, nearly all of my sex ed in middle and high school was learning about how if you had sex you would get STDs, babies, and die. Even if you used condoms. They used the ‘typical use’ condom stat, where typical use is you don’t put a condom on every time. So not that good.

Some highlights: If you do anything more intimate than kissing (ex: touching each other in the ‘underwear zone’) you’re bound to slide down the slippery slope into sex, regardless of what you intended before hand. Even more terrifying now, since I’m wondering if there was some implied ‘girls if you do x boys will want to have sex with you regardless of your wishes’.

Talking about that weird chemical released during sex like it’d permanatly bond us to our sex partners and we’d never be able to get over them.

Telling girls to work on saying no to boys at sex with nothing directed at the boys. (and how fucked up is it that my mom had to point out how massively icky this was to me)

And really 90% of it was showing us pictures of people genitals with STDs :/

Also, I didn’t even know what a clitoris was until I was 17. I had to ask my sister.

Wow, Malitia. I always had extremely heavy periods (I’d wear a tampon and a pad to bed and still get blood on the sheets), and extremely painful to boot (the pain would radiate all the way to my knees). I’m actually glad I could never manage to use the pill correctly and had to move up to Depo-Provera, because I’m one of the lucky 50% who end up having no periods on it. While I was in the process of transitioning from that to my Mirena (the hormonal IUD), I told my doctor about the severely painful and heavy periods I used to have, and she said I probably had/have endometriosis, which I had always kinda suspected.

Then there was that time my cervix started bleeding whenever I had sex, or tapped it lightly with a Monistat applicator, or looked at it funny. They ended up using a scope and applying some silver nitrate to cauterize a couple of the vessels, which was kinda fun to watch.

Don’t even get me started on yeast infections. Every time I get bit at work, the doctor puts me on antibiotics and I end up with yeastie beasties. It’s gotten to the point where I just pop a dose of Diflucan as soon as I start the antibiotics.

(As you can see, I fully support the frank and honest vagina/uterus talk. If no one’s mentioned it yet, allow me to recommend VaginaPagina)

Also the ‘woman being dry during sex’ business, could this again come down to foreskins? A penis with an intact foreskin can lubricate itself (cue lots of confusion over American lube and socks jokes) so without a foreskin would everything need to be ‘rougher’ to get more sensation? So many penis questions.

I’m circ’d, and prefer to masturbate using lube, but if I do there’s definitely a delicate balance between “enough lube that I can move my hand easily anywhere on the shaft” and “so much lube that I can’t feel a thing.” It’s the reason that I can’t really enjoy blowjobs, for that matter. Enough spit to properly lubricate leaves me numb.

@Marie, that’s some seriously horrible sex ed… It’s not that ours were good exactly, and we did have the assumption that boys are more eager than girls and girls ought not to feel pressured into doing things they don’t want to do, rather than telling everyone not to pressure anyone else for sex. There was some short mention of the existence of homo- and bisexuals, but mostly the assumption that obviously everyone here is straight. But at least there was the assumption that most teenagers are gonna have sex, and info on fairly reliable birth control methods. So, like, a hundred times better than yours, apparently.

Our sex ed didn’t acknowledge that anyone who wasn’t a cishet existed :/ I got it in Indiana*, and was totally unsurprised when I learned that sex ed doesn’t (by law) need to be medically accurate here, just that it has to teach abstinence only.

Yeah… it got me hospitalized for almost two weeks after we finally found an OB/GYN (not specialized doctors all played the not my field not my problem game). I got so much blood transfusion it caused an overreaction and I had to spend some days in the emergency room. (I really hope I find the right medical terms here. ^^;)

Sex Ed here in KY is horrible. It’s all shaming and scaring and no talk of consent, responsible sex, or anything practical.

The only time abortion is mentioned is when fundies come to the class to tell the girls that abortion is murder and they’ll regret it forever.

My daughter was soooo pissed off when she had to go through it in “Health” class. I’d call it medieval, but Hildegard of Bingen was a better sex educator than the ones we have in KY today.

Thank goodness for both Dan Savage and for his critics. He has done alot of good. That does not mean that his bads should be swept under the rug. Sometimes it’s the friendly fire that hurts the most. We need better sex educators. We can expect more from the ones we already have.

My high school would probably make most American abstinence only-style sex ed teachers break out in hives. I walked away with a very clear impression that it was assumed that I’d be getting an abortion if I got pregnant before I’d finished university. I don’t remember them trying to put us off having sex at all, it was more like “obviously you’re going to do this at some point, so here’s how to not get pregnant and/or contract any STDs”.

@matilda: Ye gods that’s awful! Please come up here to Canada, and I’ll be glad to share my awesome, free-of-charge doctor with you! She’s a very cool dyke working out of an LGBTQ health centre, and gives the least-uncomfortable pap smears in the world. And when I was having minor hormonal troubles, she tested for freaking everything, and fixed things up right.

Side note: Reading about the sub-standard health care some of you ladies have to live with *really* pisses me off! It’s not like health care’s a basic human right or anything! Grrrrr…

@cassandrakitty: What kind of pill did you try? Usually the opposite happens on the pill, so I’m curious.

And for sex ed. horrors, I only really remember two things from sex ed class. There was the childbirth video, which put me off of having kids forever. And there was the time some kid asked the teacher what oral sex was. Her face went grey, then some other kid yelled, “It’s when you sit around and talk about it!”

I barely even remember sex ed. I don’t think it was abstinence only though and we didn’t look at STI infected genitals. I mostly remember the clinical descriptions of anatomy and how the reproductive system works. I also remember we were told the truth about how you can and can not get HIV.

Really I found books and YM magazine’s annual sex ed issue more helpful. I could get as much detail as I needed and it wasn’t awkward.

Well, one prescribed iron and one sent me on a blood test, which he ignored later, because when I finally reached the OB/Gyn with the same blood test results:

“Hospital. NOW. Also a bit dizzy? With these results you should be fainting!”

And we have socialized healthcare. So it sucks but at least it doesn’t cost any money. At least legally, but it also has a huge corruption problem… so. :/ In Hungary if you can afford one find a private praxis, it might cost more initially but you don’t risk running into an asshole who would risk malpractice or negligence if you don’t pay enough to his liking.

I’m just picturing her Dad being all “An unauthorized penis has touched my former property! This is an outrage! Kids, let’s talk about what a terrible thing your mother has done” and the kids being all “wow, awkward”. I’ll be amazed if any of them are still talking to him once they’re a bit further into adulthood.

He was saying that in the car of all places, and we just were just like “He actually said that?”

He’s said way more uncomfortable things, though. Like when he kept obsessively talking about the fact that my mom started seeing other men. I remember him actually calling her a “whore”, “prostitute”, etc. And then he strove to stress every single sexual term he used, like when he angrily vented to me once and went all “Your mother had SEXUAL INTERCOURSE with a man not married to her. She’s a ZANIA*, a SINNER!” I mean it; he really did yell to emphasize his most discomforting language. I want to crawl into a hole every time he talks lik ethat.

By the way, that guy whose penis my dad was concerned about? He wasn’t even her boyfriend. That was just a false accusation my dad made to get back at her and shame her for disobeying my dad. And the funny thing is that he actually Islamically divorced her long before my mom filed for divorce herself, so she even if she was in a relationship with that man (who, incidentally, was also a shithead), she wouldn’t be cheating on my dad.

I tried 3 different pills, all of which were awful in their own unique and special ways, so I don’t remember what the “hey, want to bleed all the time?” pill was called.

@ Ally

Ah, so your Dad follows the “if my penis has touched her she’s mine for life” school of sexual ethics. Figures. I like to get annoyingly pedantic with people like that, as in “so, what exactly do you think the word prostitute means?”.

You’re spot on. He stated that his reason for calling her a prostitute was that she willingly had sex with a man she wasn’t married to and that man financially supports her. Apparently that’s a contractual exchange according to my dad.

It really hurt to hear him talk about it so much. He would talk about these things in the car for 2 hours – often with just me and him – and until I was 18 he used to tell me that I wasn’t allowed to step inside her house or even give her a hug/receive a hug from her because she was “dirty” and “sinful.” On one terrible trip to Colorado, I had wanted to see my little bother because he had been born a few weeks ago, and he literally told me that I had to hold my brother outside of the house and not hug my mom or step inside her house. When I disobeyed him, he found out quickly and constantly berated me for it.

There are also books in my room back at my dad’s house that my mom gave me as gifts, but I barely even touched them. I was too afraid to read them because I was afraid of him catching me with those books, and then asking me who I got the books from. Even mentioning her is enough to make him angry.

So “sluttiness” is now a virus that you can catch by hugging people who already have it? Even in Saudi kids are allowed to hug their own moms. Good job, Ally’s dad, for managing to out-unreasonable the mutaween.

He has this fatalistic view of humanity in which we are all heavily and irreversibly influenced by “bad company.”

Me deciding to get away from him and try to live as a woman without the threat of his abuse? Bad company. My mom deciding that he was an abusive asshole? Bad company. My older siblings choosing to leave their religion for their own sake? Bad company. And me being trans? Bad company.

And so he believed that if I related to my mom in a normal way and didn’t tell her to her face that she is a filthy sinner (he actually asked me to tell her that on numerous occasions), I’d be more fond of her and therefore do literally everything she does. Or, as he would say for the sake of manipulation, “Why don’t you go be like your sinful mother and ‘follow your heart’?” He hates the phrase “follow your heart”, a phrase my mom used very often just before the divorce, because to him it meant that she was willing to live life on her own terms and not his.

On the topic of using bc and not menstruating, I use the Nuvaring and don’t take a week between changing them with my doctor’s approval. I was having migraines that lasted the whole week of my period and my OB/gyn suggested that as a solution. It has been such a relief!

The sex ed discussion made me think of an incident with my older son right after his brother was born. He naturally had many questions while I was pregnant and I answered them in an age appropriate manor (he was 4 1/2). He was very concerned about where the baby would come out so I got books with illustrations of the female reproductive system. He wanted to see the hole where it was going to happen ON ME. I like to think I’m pretty open, but that was a no. He seemed to accept that, or so I thought. While I was in the hospital, my mother in law brought him for a visit. As soon as he walked into the room he asked at the top of his voice ” NOW can I see the hole where the baby came out?” I think my MIL, who is not overly comfortable with body topics, wanted to fall through the floor.

I have a small contribution to the period discussion. When I was young and inexperienced I went to my doctor with a bad case of thrush just after a period. He was very helpful. He cave me anti fungal ointment and a piece of unusual advice. He suggested adding some unsweetened, unflavored, probiotic yoghurt to my tampons. It would act as a lubricant, would maintain the right ph balance and would get rid of anything fungal or bacterial. I followed his advice and though I had huge problems with my reproductive system but I never got infections and had no problems with tampons.

The yoghurt is actually introducing bacteria to the vagina. Yoghurt is mold. It’s the result of bacterial fermentation of milk. You’re putting good bacteria into your vagina to out-compete the bacteria that needs to be kept at bay. When your pH is knocked off kilter and a bacteria proliferates that should be present in your vagina to a lesser extent you get bacterial vaginosis. Your vagina’s pH can and usually is normal when you have a yeast infection so treating it with a pH stabiliser won’t help. You need to limit the growth of Candida either by killing off the Candida or out-competing it to beat a yeast infection. Reestablishing normal pH AND introducing “good” bacteria may work to treat BV.

Like @LBT, I am a total menstrual cup convert. I adore the thing, and am really glad it works for me – my periods actually got lighter and shorter. I had to use pads along with the cup for the first few months, but not anymore (may I recommend Party In My Pants for awesome cloth pads… some very cool retro fabrics!)

Weird thing happened when I started using the cup – I was emptying it and cleaning up, and… well, what looked like a big slab of meat was in there. Happened again – lots of pain beforehand, then a ‘popping’ sensation. Turns out it was an enormous hunk of uterine lining, pretty much in the shape of my uterus. Periods since then have been awesome and trouble-free (I used to be really heavy and get horrible cramping). No clue if this has anything to do with switching from tampons to the cup – the last time I used a tampon (after using the cup for about 8 months) I had a horrible allergic reaction so maybe something was going on there, who knows.

Re: sex ed – I went to catholic elementary school, and we actually had decent sex ed. My Gr. 7 teacher (who is now my stepmother, looooooong story) had a question box at the front of the room so we could submit anonymous sex questions, and she’d answer them pretty honestly. My mum was really open too, and she had some very interesting books.

Doctors seem to be using yoghurt and raw honey as treatment for antibiotic-resistant infections (yoghurt) and wound dressings (honey) too. I was in hospital being treated for cancer a while ago and picked up two of the damned things. They had me in isolation for weeks and then some bright spark decided to feed me probiotic yoghurt. They were both gone in less than a week. I got really fond of yoghurt after that and started buying it by the liter, then learned to make my own. My doctors said that there were so many antibiotic-resistant infections floating around hospitals these days that they were considering recommending that it should be given to both patients and staff (the nurses said that most of them had the infections too. They were really easy to pick up) on a regular basis.

I’m a big fan of yoghurt. Without it I’d have been stuck in isolation for even longer.

“if you could grind a woman’s entire being to dust with your dick, like a mortar and pestle, that’s the oblivion she is searching for”…few women ever get experience such pleasure, thats why sites like this exist.

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.